More Fun

Happy Earth Day, friends! Today’s “from our readers” feature introduces Brenda, a Canadian expat living it up in Mexico and slashing up old T-shirts whenever she can. She asked me a question over Twitter awhile ago, and I was just too slow in answering (I do so understand when the scissors start getting a little twitchy, and one needs to forge on!), so Brenda, resourceful lady that she is, found a design on the Internets to help fulfill her vision (if anyone knows the source, let me know so I can properly link it! UPDATE: Properly linked to the source shirt!). See the result of Brenda’s T-shirt snipping (white T-shirt, left).

It’s a beautiful day here in Brooklyn, the short sleeves are out, and so is the sun. It finally feels like spring, which as you all know, means one thing over here at Generation T HQ: It’s T-shirt weather! Here’s a song by the Lucksmiths that we’re obviously smitten rather with. Enjoy!

I love it when the T-shirt refashioning community rallies for a cause. Sure, Earth Day is around the corner, and the more old T-shirts that can be saved from the trash bin, the better, but this amazing photo from Valerie, a high school teacher in the Bay Area, really warmed my heart. Valerie’s homeroom group used the Generation T books as inspiration to craft pink superhero capes, pink headbands, pink hats, and pink belts from old T-shirts in honor of Pink Tsunami, a school-wide event created to rally against bullying of LGBT students.

The day, which was founded in response to an incident involving a boy being bullied for wearing pink, has become an annual tradition at the school (which has been featured before on Generation-T.com!) — and this particular photo was from a February 2011 celebration. T-shirt sleeves were transformed into hats, scraps were braided into headbands and belts, and students wore handmade superhero capes all day to show support for the anti-bullying message. And, of course, they had a blast doing it.

In December, I heard from a teacher at the Lincoln High School Green Academy, a 3 year program for kids interested in potential careers or majors in the green economy. Her students took old PE uniforms (brilliant!) and made hats and bags (projects #72 Mohawk Mo’ Rock! and #42 Plastic Surgery from Generation T: Beyond Fashion) to give as gifts to the Principal, Assistant Principals, and other members of the school staff who helped them.

Be still my heart: Rescuing shirts that would otherwise have been trash-bound and upcycling them into giftable items!

They’re sure doing more than hanging mistletoe around iLoveToCreate studios. The company I blog for once a month (check out my recent holiday T-shirt project) is celebrating the season with a pretty sweet giveaway! You can enter to win an Apple iPad — you know, one of those well-designed electronic tablets on which to read all your favorite inspiration sites and blogs all year long — you know, like (ahem) ilovetocreate.com or generation-t.com. Details below…

1 Lucky Winner will win:

Apple iPad Wi-Fi 16 GB – 3rd generation

Pick up the iPad and suddenly, it’s clear. You’re actually touching
your photos, reading a book, playing the piano. Nothing comes between
you and what you love. To make that hands-on experience even better,
they made the fundamental elements of iPad better – the display, the
camera, the wireless connection. All of which makes the third-generation
iPad capable of so much more than you ever imagined. Everything you do
with iPad, you do through its large, beautiful display. And when the
display is better, the entire iPad experience is better. The Retina
display on the iPad features a 2048-by-1536 resolution, 44-percent
greater color saturation, and an astounding 3.1-million pixels – in the
same 9.7-inch space. That’s four times the number of pixels in iPad and a
million more than an HDTV. Those pixels are so close together, your
eyes can’t discern individual ones at a normal viewing distance. When
you can’t see the pixels, you see the whole picture. Or article. Or
game. In ways you never could before.

As some of us on the East Coast slowly emerge from the effects of the-decidedly-not-T-shirt-weather that recently blew through, here is, nonetheless, some T-shirt fun to help brighten the atmosphere. (And, I might add, a rather nice resource for some more last-minute T-shirt-based Halloween costumes!)

How many movie characters can you recognize by their T-shirt? — or rather, how many T-shirts can you recognize from their starring roles? (Because let’s face it, some of these T-shirts are so iconic, they deserve a line in the film credits!)

As you longtime readers know, sometimes I trade in my sewing room for some kitchen crafting. One recent weekend, I did just that, to make homemade teething biscuits for little Baby T (aka Niko). You heard me say teething, right? Hehehe. (Okay, I’ll use my T-shirt cookie cutter next time, for a better tie-in.) I very barely modified the recipe from Imprintalish (as you can see, I liked her idea of using a heart-shaped cookie cutter, and added some more geometric shapes to the mix!), then of course quadrupled the recipe to make enough for all of Niko’s pals.

Yields about one dozen biscuits, depending on the size and shape cookie cutters you use.

Make it:
Preheat the oven to 425ºF. In a large bowl, mix together the dry ingredients (flour, rice cereal, and cinnamon). Then add the wet ingredients (oil, banana, and water). Mix everything together until the dough forms a firm, non-sticky dough. (Lish, of Imprintalish, suggests adding water or flour, 1 tablespoon at a time, if necessary.)

On a clean, dry, flour-dusted surface, roll out the dough so that it is approximately 1/4″ thick. Use cookie cutters to cut out the shapes.

Bake it:Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and arrange the shapes on the paper. Then bake for 10-12 minutes.

Remove the tray from the oven and use a spatula to transfer the biscuits to a cooling rack.

Taste it:
Test them out on a baby or two! Here are Niko and some of his friends gnawing on the heart- and doughnut-shaped biscuits. (The doughnut shapes seemed to be the most popular — since they’re easier to grip!)

Note: Teething biscuits should only be given to babies accustomed to chewing solid foods. Children should always be seated in an upright position and supervised while eating. To determine whether your child is ready for teething biscuits, he or she should be able to crawl on hands and knees, with tummy completely off the floor; use jaws to mash food with gums; eat thicker, lumpier foods with large pieces, and hold small foods in between forefinger and thumb.

Earlier this summer, I got an email from my brother and sister-in-law with the subject line “T-shirt Guru, Help!” Maria and Franz are two musicians on an adventure along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Like any good musicians, they travel with merch, and like any good merch-peddlers, they run out of stuff fast. So they were down to two XXL T-shirts and quickly discovered that their fans were tending to come in smaller sizes. Maria writes…

“Franz and I have two XXL T-shirts left of one design and people much smaller than XXL keep expressing interest, but then balk at the size. We have a long train ride coming up, so I started thinking about trying to convert the shirts into cute, cut-up T-shirts. My sewing abilities and supplies are limited, but we’ve got decent scissors, safety pins, and a travel sewing kit. Can you recommend an easy-ish pattern that we could sell to a punky Russian girl?”

How could I ignore such a request? A few cross-continent consultation emails later, Maria and Franz had set up shop: They’d been crashing with some cute punk gals in the outer boroughs of St. Petersburg, and set up a workspace on their kitchen table. Armed with a pair of scissors, and that travel sewing kit, they set to work transforming their merch. Measuring and marking…

Sveta, one of the aforementioned cute punk girls who was looking on, was suspicious of all the scissor activity, but once she tried on the completed result, she asked if she could keep it, so, it seemed to be working. Nothing like converting a skeptic!

Then it was time to tackle “Outer Lace” (project #16) fromGeneration T.

And then they set off in search of one of the Russian editions of the two books, should any additional emerchencies arise.

UPDATE from the road: “We just sold the last of our Generation T-styled Franz Nicolay shirts to the fashionable women of Orenburg Russia. Thanks for the designs!”

One of my favorite familial designations (big sister, mother, daughter, niece, cousin) is that of “Aunt.” So you can imagine my elation last week when I got an email from CC, another proud auntie who recently sent a copy of Generation T as part of a care package to her niece when an emergency appendectomy (!) threatened to derail the family vacation. Her niece (and nephew) were bummed about the change in course (who wants to go to the emergency room when you’re expecting a relaxing week on Cape Cod?) and Auntie CC had just the remedy. Needless to say, her gift was well-received: “I was on auntie cloud 9 when I got this photo. Thanks for making me look good!”

The young lady (standing here with her brother, who’s wearing a pretty cool T-shirt himself) was so proud of the butterfly slashed tee she made (variation on project #2 Brokenhearted in Generation T that we all hearted so much last month) that she selected it to wear on her first day of school. Now that, my friends, is quite the compliment!

She used the same technique as you would for the slashed heart, but simply used the outline of a butterfly as a guide instead. The great thing about this look is she can change the color of her tank top underneath and change the color of her butterfly — orange for a monarch or yellow for a tiger swallowtail.

Back in April 2009, craftyveganlibrarian hosted a Tee Party for a magnificent seven DIY teens at the library where she works. The group used scissors and safety pins to customize their wardrobes using a handful of no-sew techniques. Below is the “Brokenhearted” tee design (project #3) by the crafty librarian herself, found on page 30 in Generation T.